Joëlle Cabanne

Joëlle Cabanne is a woman of obsession. She’s an interior designer and a passionate artist; she sees the world in terms of design and cuts. Photography, drawing, painting, she multiplies the horizon, which tirelessly haunts her work for years. Lines turned into a real obsession. However, her career was not as straight forward. She graduated in visual arts before studying history of art, cinema and modern Greek at the University of Geneva and Lausanne. A bachelor later, she will finally follow the footsteps of her father by integrating the EPFL’s architecture section. Not subtle enough. She has a strong interest in architecture but she’d rather be indoors and add a touch of design. She came back to Geneva and was admitted to the HEAD’s interior design section. One more diploma in hand, she was off working for architecture offices.

Today, Joëlle Cabanne teaches at the CFPA (Arts Vocational Training Center) and recently launched her own architect cabinet in France with her husband, whom she met at the HEAD while she was a student. She also owns her studio, located in the oldest industrial building in Saint-Jean, which is none other than the former Attitude Gallery. There, Joëlle composes unreal landscapes from panoramas she photographs. After printing in the laboratory, she cuts the layers, classifies them by colour, then recreates new environments by juxtaposition. A process that gives her the freedom, with a sly chisel, to be able to cut the head of our traditional Matterhorn in order to recreate an imaginary mountain. Her works of art don’t have any human element; she invites the eye of the observer to analyse and the traveller to contemplate. Some of her landscapes inspire, others oppress.

One of her main project is called Petit Ermitage. This is a series of frames with a single black and white photo. A shed perched on a hill, photographed in 2005 during a holiday in Greece. Each painting declines the sky by borrowing various blues from the Pantone colour chart. Thus, taking again the law of the simultaneous contrast, the eye confers on the photo a different depth according to the blue which is attributed to him. This is an optical phenomenon related to our perception of colours.

I invite you to discover the work of this artist, currently exhibited at the Bal des Créateurs, until the end of April. A coup de coeur…